First Impressions: Summer 2014 – Terror in Resonance, Majimoji Rurumo and Kuroshitsuji: Book of Circus

First up for today are teenage terrorists, witches going commando and the return of one hell of a butler – Terror in Resonance, Majimoji Rurumo and Kuroshitsuji: Book of Circus.

Terror in Resonance

Well I’m sold – this was a great opening episode which was almost movie quality! From the great OP and wonderful snow-mobile chase scene through to the climatic bombing of the iconic twin towers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building, this show just screams quality. The only minor niggle I have is with the central trio being high-schoolers……we will never escape high-schoolers in anime. But there is enough of a tease in Nine & Twelve’s mysterious past in some sort of institution that suggests there is more to these boys than first meets the eye. The truly ordinary high-schooler is Lisa – the unlucky victim of bullying who then gets caught up in Nine & Twelve’s schemes. The boys make a big deal of her involvement being her own choice, but really Lisa’s only choice was severe injury/death or becoming an accomplice of these teenage terrorists – I know which I would have went with too!

The characters are intriguing – Nine is aloof and cool as ice with a razor-sharp intellect, Twelve appears energetic and childish, but has a dangerous edge to him and Lisa just seems like a classic bullying victim and may have an eating disorder. Nine & Twelve have an interesting dynamic for having such different personalities – there is a trust there that can only be forged through shared experience and I’m intensely interested in what has driven these two young boys to choose a life of terrorism. It will be interesting to see how Lisa fits into the dynamic as a true outsider. Yeap, definitely shaping up to be a fascinating show.

The production values are also fantastic with a large budget and excellent direction. It feels ambitious and interesting, plus it looks & sounds great – there is very little to complain about with this first episode of Terror in Resonance. Successive episodes will have to work at making the characters a bit more endearing, but early signs are positive – definitely keeping on.

Majimoji Rurumo

Perverted high-schooler has cute witch girl fall in his lap and grants his every perverted wish…..at the cost of chipping away at his life. It could have been funny if presented in a vibrant way, but Majimoji Rurumo is painfully bland and uninspired. MC-kun is way too screechy and since he doesn’t fully commit to being an unrepentant pervert or comically misunderstood, he just seems boring. Rurumo hails from the emotionless girl school of anime stereotypes and isn’t particularly interesting to watch. Pretty happy Wataru Watanabe decided to move into bikes & bromance instead.

Not much to get excited about on the production front – it’s all fairly standard. Not particularly interesting in general – dropped.

Kuroshitsuji: Book of Circus

Well this was just a reintroduction to the characters so was very similar to the first episode of the first season – not an entirely bad thing since it was an excellent refresher. I really enjoy Kuroshitsuji and the Circus arc is one of the more colourful and interesting arcs so I’m super excited to see it animated. Considering the way they’ve given a nice recap of the basic story and characters you could possibly go right into this season, but you will be missing some vital backstory elements from the first season.

Animation is really solid – I especially like the ED animation. Really excited to see the Circus characters properly introduced next week. Definitely keeping on.

Pretty sure Terror in Resonance will be the best show of the summer for me – and quite easily at that, even though there’s otherwise a really nice spread this season. And like you, I’m very happy to see not a sequel but instead a remake of Kuroshitsuji. It’s looking visually quite nice, and while I haven’t read the manga, I’m still really glad to see that the anime is going to be sticking more closely to the source material this time.

Terror in Resonance certainly has all the initial hallmarks of an exceptional series – really hope it delivers!

New Kuroshitsuji series looks like it will be mostly ignoring the anime original stuff that preceeded it. The Noah’s Circus arc is pretty self-contained so they can afford to do that too – the arc is complete so there shouldn’t be any random filler either.

And I’m really happy on both those counts. I did enjoy the very first series of Kuroshitsuji but it still had its glaring faults, and I think they’ll be lessened a great deal if this new series is more faithful to the source material. And while I don’t mind a bit of filler every now and again, I mostly get impatient with it. Since Book of Circus is only slated for 10 episodes at this point, I don’t think they’ll be wasting any time with the filler side of things.